Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 57: Troubleshooting Shutdowns, Taming Overflowing Inboxes, and Tuning Core Values

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about solidifying your shutdown routines, taming overflowing inboxes, and tuning core values, among many other topics. We also conclude our deep dive into the topic of the deep reset.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can also submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:DEEP DIVE: The Deep Reset, Part 5WORK QUESTIONS- Advanced preparation for deep work blocks. [14:52]- Time blocking chaotic sales jobs. [18:07]- Being supportive of peer success. [20:11]- Shut down ritual troubles. [24:21]- Building the ideal home office. [27:31]- Dealing with deep work dips during busy periods. [31:29]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS- Are podcasts distractions? [35:00]- Dealing with an overflowing inbox. [41:10]- Time blocking household activities. [50:11]- Remembering what you read. [54:06]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS- Updating core values and productivity roots. [57:02]- When productivity swamps out everything else. [1:01:06]- The deep life versus maximizing success. [1:05:54]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This podcast is brought to you in part by Blinkist. We are coming up now on the New Year's season, which is that time of year in which you focus on how to make your life even more deep, even more meaningful, even more satisfying. And one of the key ways you can do this is by upgrading your knowledge. And a very effective way to increase your knowledge is with Blinkist. As I've explained, this is a subscription service in which you get access to 15-minute summaries, both in text and audio formats of over 4,000 non-fiction books. Over 15 million people already use this service. If you want to learn about a particular topic, you want to learn about a particular idea,

if you want to learn about a particular historical event or new business strategy, you grab the blink 15 minutes later, you have the basics. As I've long recommended on this podcast, you can use Blinks to help learn a field quickly and then decide which are the important books to then go ahead and read in their entirety. This new year, give yourself the gift of upgrading your knowledge. Blinkist can make it happen. And right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you can start a free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist

premium membership. Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the Deep Life. Two quick announcements. First, if the holidays are about giving gifts to other people. The upcoming New Year season is about giving gifts to yourself,

the gifts of self-improvement. So with that in mind, I would be remiss if I did not briefly mention some items from the Cal Newport Library that could help serve this purpose. If you are looking to get more organized about your time in the new year, consider my time block planner. You can find out more at timeblockplanner.com. If you are looking to improve your relationship with your digital devices, maybe after a long pandemic spent doom scrolling or Netflix numbing, I would recommend my most recent book, Digital Minimalism. All right, second announcement, it's been a while since I have thanked those who have been leaving reviews for the podcast,

but it really has been important. I have been hearing from new listeners who say they decided to try the show because of the reviews they read. I want to give brief thanks to one of the more recent reviews. It came from Ginny. She said it took me three or four episodes before I became hooked. I absolutely love his outlook and perspective and find the majority of the information to be extremely practical and useful. She labeled the review, this is my favorite podcast. So thank you, Ginny, and thank you everyone else who has been leaving reviews.

I read them all and it makes me happy. All right, that's enough with announcements. Let's move on with the deep dive. As I've been mentioning, I am videotaping each of these deep dive segments. This is the last deep dive on the topic of the deep reset. So I will be posting these videos soon once I figure out how to do it.

So stay tuned for that information. We have come now to the final part of our deep dive into the topic of the deep reset. Of course, you remember the underlying idea here as we go through a time of disruption as we did in 2020, we have this inclination to transform our lives, to allow this disruption to be the accelerant

towards a transformation to a deeper, more meaningful, satisfying life. The deep reset was a collection of ideas about how to plan and execute one of these transitions, one of these transformations effectively. We talked about how to get some silence into your life so you could actually listen to these intimations about what matters to you.

We talked about working from these intimations into actual concrete changes. In the last part of this deep dive series, I gave some advice on how to actually plan and execute non-trivial changes in your life. There was, however, one piece that I put put aside, which was changes to your career. Changes to your career are so significant, so impactful and so fraught, I figured it was worth a complete separate part, which is what I

want to talk about in today's segment. How do you apply this deep reset mentality to what you do for a living? Now, this is a topic I've talked about before. Longtime readers of mine know from my 2012 book so good they can't ignore you that I have an unusual amount of skepticism, I guess, compared to the rest of the culture when it comes to my thoughts on the connection between what you do in your job and your happiness and your sense of passion and your sense of meaning. Readers of that 2012 book know that I think people overestimate the impact of the content of their work on their satisfaction. And because of this, people are too willing to make drastic career changes, thinking that the change itself, just the fact that they're making a drastic change, will give them more satisfaction in their life, or that if they drastically shift to another type of work, that new type of work is going to give them a lot more passion or meaning or satisfaction.

I'm very skeptical of that. The career capital theory that I lay out in that book argues that the relationship. between workplace satisfaction. Your work and satisfaction, I should say, is a little bit more transactional. As you build up a rare and valuable skills, you can use these skills as leverage to gaining your career things that resonate, that make your career better and move away from the things that you dislike. And therefore, the real focus, I would argue, would be on building rare and valuable skills.

Simply changing the content of your job is not enough to get you the types of traits that makes work great work great. You actually have to have something really good to offer in return. People underestimate their capacity to actually transform their current work into a source of real meaning and passion built on a foundation of aggressively and deliberately acquired skill. So that's my standard thinking on it. I'm a great opponent of the phrase follow your passion because again, I think it places too much emphasis on the content of your work is what's going to dictate your happiness. All of those ideas still hold. So as you're thinking about career transformations in the deep reset, career capital should reign high up on your list of priorities.

All things being equal, shifting to something that will preserve or make use of the career capital you have already built is probably going to be a shorter path to work that you love than trying to do something completely different. They talked about in that book, if you've built up a lot of skills as say marketing executive, quitting to start a yoga studio means you're throwing out all of your career capital. You're starting from scratch with career capital acquisition, so you should not expect right off the bat to have a job you really enjoy because a lot of what you imagined and enjoying is actually going to require that you're really good at something and you use that as leverage. All right, all that being said, there is some caveats I want

to add specifically inspired by the pandemic because I have been hearing from lots of readers, lots of listeners and lots of friends who have made shifts during the pandemic, but these shifts were less about the content of their work. See, what you do for a living has a big impact on other parts of your life. Notably, for example, what you do during the day, how much time during the day you're actually involved in professional activities. Where you live is another big thing that what you do plays a big role in. We're used to this idea of following the job, following a career.

It takes us where we need to go, prioritize the career. During the pandemic, a lot of people have been making career changes, not to follow their passion, not to find a job that they think is going to have better content, a job that itself is going to make them feel better, but to instead make sometimes radical changes to these other aspects, such as where they live and how much work they do, how much time they actually spend working.

those are very important factors. And this is what I have learned listening to the people who have gone through these changes recently. It makes a really big difference. Where you live matters. And so if a shift to another job, for example, brings you into a living situation, a location that is much more optimal

for all of these things you've identified as you've gone throughout the Deep Reset as being important to you. If it's much more optimal for that, that is a big deal. and that's something to pay attention to. If, for example, shifting your jobs brings you to a part of the country where now you can be much more thickly connected to family,

as I know a lot of people have been doing, that makes a really big difference. That is a change that will pay dividends. If shifting to a new job takes you out of a location where you didn't really like living, maybe you didn't like the people, maybe it was stressful and it brings you to a location that more aligns with things you care about,

that is a change that can pay dividends in the perpetuity. You know, I interviewed on this podcast not too long ago. My friend, author, Brad Stolberg, they moved from a big city on the west coast to Asheville. I guess that's North Carolina. Maybe South Carolina might have that mixed up. But he moved to Asheville.

This is someone who writes for outside magazine, someone who loves outside activities. They now live in this small town where you have a cool Main Street, and here's a bookstore, and here's a coffee store, and you go for a short walk out of your house, and you're in the woods for hiking and mountain biking, coming from where they were in a urban sprawl,

that is a gift that is going to keep paying benefits. And I've heard stories like this again and again. So I think that's important. The amount of work you're doing is also important, and I think this period of disruption, have gotten people to pay more attention to that. So if you can, for example, negotiate a remote work setup that gets rid of long commutes.

That really matters. That's really going to make your life better again and again. Again, it's a reward, a dividend that's going to keep paying. If you want to significantly cut back the amount of work you do, if you want to change your career situation so you or your partner now can actually be home full-time for a while your kids are a certain age, these are the types of drastic changes that can really give you real dividends. And again, they have nothing to do with the content of your work,

but the impact of the work on the structure of your life, where you live and how you spend your time. So I am going to add this addendum to my career advice, my standard career advice, for the purposes of the deep reset. This is a good time as you've gone through this moments of silence, as you've listened to these intimations, if you've experimented, gotten used to what matters and what does it matter.

This is not a bad time. There is a lot of, let's say, social cover, a lot of cultural acceptability right now of saying, just prioritizing what I do for a living or my success at that job, just prioritizing that is no longer my focus. And I'm willing to maybe prioritize some other things. I'm willing to maybe not continue at the same rate through my career track to shift over to like a remote situation. We're going to move halfway across the country. I'm willing to maybe pause my career. I want to stay home for the next five years. I'm willing to shift the consulting. So the

I'm working sort of half time and now we're living, you know, by the beach somewhere in the panhandle of Florida. I don't know, whatever it is. This is not a bad time to be thinking about those type of changes and work can be a real lever to help you get there. So actually, this is a rare exception to my conservatism on these issues. I'm saying as you finish off your deep reset, keep that in mind. Keep in mind this notion of the impact of your work on where you live and how.

much you work and whether or not those are places where you want to make drastic changes, because if there's a drastic change to be had, if you can do it without giving up too much career capital, so you don't have to start from scratch trying to build up career capital, that you can actually shift to this new thing and still have a lot of leverage, a lot of control, if you can get that done and it's going to make a change, you think it's going to be very beneficial to you along these things, then I think it is worth considering. A lot of people have, and I think a lot of people have gotten a lot of benefits out of it. So that's where I'm going to leave this discussion of the Deep Reset.

Now, again, this is just a sampling of ways to think about making changes in your life on my podcast and in my books and in my articles. We cover this topic all the time. We have all sorts of different methods and ideas and techniques and philosophies for how to craft the deeper life. So this is not the be all or end all of how you transform your life. but hopefully it gives you some structure, some structure to begin with when you begin to think how in response to recent disruptions, disruptions that have been intense,

but that will inevitably diminish. How in response to these disruptions do I want to respond? How do I want to change my life? A deep reset is warranted. There's a lot of ways to do one. Hopefully this series gave you some good ideas. All right, that was fun. I'm still thinking about what I want to do for the next deep,

I might wait a week or two before I begin it, but this has been a fun segment, so I think we will do some more. All right, with that in mind, let's move on now with some work questions. Our first question comes from Dennis, who says, I have been time blocking for a couple of months now with moderate success.

I also bought the planner. I, however, find myself in blocks allocated to deep work where I need input from others, or maybe I need to gather some additional information, how do I best prepare for blocks with deep work? Well, Dennis, this is a common problem where what we consider to be a deep work block actually also contains other tasks that might fall under shallow

or otherwise induce cognitive context switching. So needing to jump on Slack and ask a question of a colleague to send an email and then importantly keep waiting until you get that response or maybe having to go on the internet to look some things up. Once you're doing this in the middle of a deep work block, as you point out, you're no longer really doing deep work because at the core of the effectiveness of this activity is the lack of context shifts. So a couple of things to recommend here.

One, you probably just need to break up these blocks. I'm usually pretty careful when I'm thinking about, let's say, working on an article or working on a book chapter, at considering the gathering of notes, the gathering of information as a completely separate thing from the deep activity of writing. And I just separate them out. And they might be separated by a lot of time. Like today, I'm gathering that information tomorrow.

I am writing. Or they could be one after another. I'm going to do the information gatherings and shift over to uninterrupted writing. So as you get used to the type of work, your time block planning here, Dennis, you can get better at extracting the cognitive context shifting behaviors,

extracting those and making them their own blocks. so that the application of that information can take place without interruption. The other thing I will say is that some types of interruptions are okay. So in particular, I find myself often in a situation where I'm writing. I've tried to gather everything in advance, but as I'm going, I realize I need this stat. You know, I'm thinking like my most recent article for The New Yorker was on the Salesforce's acquisition of Slack. and, you know, I'm writing, and I remember at some point, like,

oh, I need to know what is the annual revenue. What's the annual revenue of Slack? Just where my article is taking me, that's the piece I need right there. You have a couple options there. You can sort of put in a placeholder and come back or fill that in later, but also, I think jumping on the internet

to grab a fact or an information or a quote that's related to the thing you're doing doesn't necessarily induce a large context shifting cost. So for me to jump on to Google and look up Slack's annual revenue and then put that back in the article, I don't think I had the loss of cognitive function that I would have if I had instead gone into an email inbox

or gone and looked at a unrelated topic. So I want to overswet things like jumping on the internet to grab some information, but definitely for communication, getting on tools, waiting for emails, that type of thing. Extract that and treat that as a separate block to the extent that you're able to do it. All right, Bill asks, as a territory sales rep, I cover five states.

Time blocking works great on office days, which are typically Monday and Friday. Tuesday through Thursday, I'm out of my hotel and in meetings or cold calls. My day can be so chaotic that time block planning only works early in the morning or late afternoon when I get back to the hotel and catch up. Any recommendations? Bill, I think it is fine to apply time blocking differentially to different times and times. days of the week. I mean, it sounds like for you, where you're going to get the biggest benefit from time blocking is going to be your office days, Monday and Friday. It's going to help you get the most out of that limited time where you're actually at the office and able to make

progress on whatever it is, administrative or logistical tasks. I think having some time blocking for your morning and afternoon sessions to make sure that stuff that needs to get done does something, you know, whatever it is, you have to make progress during the week on this sales pitch because it has to go out Thursday night, you know, you put aside that time in the morning, you put aside that time in the afternoons. Having that intentionality, I think is important. I also think it's fine if in the middle of the day on Tuesdays through Thursdays, it is chaotic. It's you're on calls, you're jumping to different sales meetings, you're not sure how long they're going to last. I think it's fine if you're not trying to predict in advance and just

continually frustrating yourself that you can't predict in advance what those parts of the day are going to look like. Just have good systems in place, good capture, allow yourself to focus on each thing you're doing one at a time and do it well, make sure that you're planning in the morning has helped aim you at what does need to get done that day. So even if you're not blocking out your minutes during those chaotic middays, Tuesday through Thursdays, I think that's okay. Block the times that are more structured, have some intention still about what you do during the chaotic time, have good systems in place so things don't spiral out of control, and I think that is a good balance of strategies for your particular line of work.

Jens asks, I should be happy that my peers and my research group are publishing good papers, and I am also doing that. However, if someone gets a paper rejected, I feel somewhat calm because I know they do not get ahead of me. How can I change this perception and be supportive and happy about their success? Well, the first thing you want to do is be happy about your own process. If your mind suspects that you're not really approaching your work in an optimal way, that you're not structuring your time, you're not being intentional about your energy,

you're not doing the efforts that you know from watching your more successful mentors and peers really move the needle in your field, you're not doing those efforts, you're doing what's easier. If any of that's going on, your mind is going. going to be more self-recriminative. It's going to look onto the success or failures of others in a more emotional way. And so getting your own house and order and finding some peace in how you approach your own work, some confidence that I'm doing this well. And I'm continuing to stretch myself, and I'm continuing to grow. And my work is part of a well-rounded deep life. There's the other buckets of the deep life that I'm also giving attention to. And yes, maybe I am making some sacrifices

to craft because I also want community to be stronger. And maybe I could be producing a little bit more, but I'm not because that would mean I would be completely monastic, whatever it is, right? But you're comfortable with what you're doing. The trajectory it's putting you on and how it's making use of your talents and how it fits into your broader life. That's going to help because if you're not,

you're going to have a lot more of this pushback about, ooh, I'm jealous that person is doing better. Ooh, I'm happy that person is doing worse. So that helps. Beyond that, though, I think there's probably some insight to be gained from the Jewish tradition. The Jewish tradition tends to focus more on the external than the internal. It tends to focus less on exactly what you think, exactly what's going on inside your head, and focus more on how you actually behave, how you actually act.

There's, of course, a lot of wisdom in this because your outer actions have a way over time, of shaping what happens inside, but also what happens inside can be out of your control. There's certain emotions and feelings that are going to come up. You can't control them, so why obsess about it?

So in this context, that would mean commit to being someone who is very and genuinely supportive of your peers. You're proud of them when they do well. You let them know. You brag about them. You help them feel better

when they do worse. You refrain completely from trying to do ego mitigation. Ego mitigation is by far the, it's very bald, it's very obvious, it doesn't fool anyone. So by ego mitigation, I mean you have to throw in those comments when someone's paper gets in about like, well, you know, I've been whatever. I haven't been feeling well recently or people don't like my topic or you're trying to in the moment to add some information so that you don't seem so bad by comparison or to try to ding what someone else did. I'm just not going to do that, just none of it. And you let the inner emotions come and go.

jealousy, Schaden Freud, whatever, that comes and goes, but you are the person who is relentlessly outwardly, positive and supportive.

Never trying to make excuses for when you do bad, not trying to brag too much when you do well. If you act like a good person in this way, you essentially become a good person in this way.

First of all, people know that about you. They'll learn to respect that about you. They will learn to respect you more. That respect will be meaningful to you.

And you will also find, you know, as a Jewish tradition tells you that this outward changes will have an eventual impact on the inner. So that's what I would, that's what I would recommend, act as if, act as if you are very supportive, act as if you're not jealous, act as if you don't find straddenfoid when people do poorly, and changes inward will follow those outward commitments. Moving on, Joe asks, I'm having trouble carrying out the shutdown complete steps at works

end. By the time I get to 5.30, I am out of energy. I end up coming back to the shutdown complete later in the evening. This puts me at risk of not completing it. Any tips or best practices to help adhere to a 5 or 530-ish time frame. A few things to say here, Joe. First of all, the shutdown complete ritual should be part of your time block schedule. As you go through your day, executing various time blocks, you actually have time blocks. out at the end of the day for the shutdown routine. So you want to leave the mindset of I do my scheduled work. The work is done.

And then I have to sort of on an ad hoc basis go and do a shutdown routine at some point. No, it should be part of what you schedule. It is a block. You execute it. Two, it's possible that your routine is too long. It shouldn't take you too long to do a quick shutdown. And it's okay if some days you have longer shutdown routines than others. but I would make this much shorter,

something you can do in five or ten minutes max, so that the lift is not so big. Remember, for a good shutdown complete ritual, what you're doing is you're checking open loops, checking your plan, assuring yourself that you are okay to complete work for the day. That can be pretty quick. I mean, you can glance through your inboxes.

Remember, you're not trying to empty your inbox. You're not trying to deal with everything in your inbox at the end of the day. You just want to make sure that you didn't miss something, that there's nothing in there that is going to, to be a problem if you wait until tomorrow. You want to look at your calendar. You have an early morning meeting. Am I missing something that's happening later in the evening? I'll just keep an eye on it. Okay, fine. Look at your weekly plan. Am I on track? Do I know roughly what I'm doing tomorrow? Great. If you have some things that you captured, some tasks or ideas you captured throughout

the day, maybe on the capture pages in your time block planner, get those into your system so that you aren't forgetting them, they're safe. This is quick. It's just about, I didn't miss anything. I will be okay if I stop work today and pick it up tomorrow. And then check off that checkbox. You can do this in five or ten minutes, so it's possible that one of your issues here is you're trying to do too much

during your shutdown routine. Finally, make a big deal about concluding the routine. So if you use the time block planner, actually checking that shutdown complete checkbox. if you don't use the time block planner, have a phrase you say or a check box somewhere that you check, you want to make that the habit that you feel really uncomfortable missing.

You want your mind to learn to crave that shutdown complete check and associate that with mental relief. When that is seen as a reward and what you have to do only takes five minutes and it's in your time block schedule, you're going to do it consistently. So I think you're probably, Joe, just a few tweaks away from having a successful shutdown ritual working.

And I, again, really will push for doing that. You really do want to have a shutdown at the end of your day. The benefits are surprisingly large. All right, here's a question that's probably relevant to a lot of people these days. It comes from Jonathan. He says, I'm relocating to a new city, buying a new house, and starting a new remote work. job as a senior software tester for a firm specializing in machine learning algorithms. Ideally, what size of room should my new home office be?

And from a deep work perspective, is it okay to dual use this space with other things I use outside of work hours such as exercise equipment? I think what's important when it comes to a home office workspace is having a space that you can associate with work so that the moving into that space, the physical co-location into that space helps your mind shift into a work mindset and leaving that space conversely helps your mind leave the work mindset. So with that in mind, I think if your office is also used for a couple other very specific things. So this is the office slash home gym. I think that's okay. I think if you're building your office in a basement and maybe it's also where the laundry is done,

that's okay. Because these are particular activity. that are done for a little bit of time and are very specific, I think that's fine. Where you might have a little bit more of an issue from a cognitive output perspective is if your workspace is sharing with personal life space. So if you're working in your living room where you also watch TV and you also eat your meals, if you're working in your bedroom, for example, I mean, this could all be fine. But it's a little bit better if you have a space that you associate with very specific things. And so I go here to work and I go here to work out.

I think that's fine. Now, if you want to get really advanced, and this is something that most people aren't going to be able to do, but let's say, you know, you're buying a new house and you have a lot of options about how you're going to configure this house or configure your property. Having a space nearby that is outside of your actual house is even better from a mindset perspective of shifting from work mode to non-work mode.

so you know taking that apartment above your garage and turn into an office even if it's maybe a little bit less nice in some sense than the the office right there in the front of your house by your living room it's an interesting idea because now you leave the house and go up to that garage apartment you're in work mode you have a commute a commute might be 10 feet but you're still leaving one space and going to another space I also think building outbuildings So these sort of prefab work sheds If you have enough property

Is a really interesting idea Especially as we shift to increased remote work So you go out to this deep work Working shed to do your work And it's separate from your house When you're there, you're doing that When you're back at your house I also think if we're going to get really radical

Having a separate place for deep work versus shallow work, why not? if it's possible. I could imagine, for example, a blue sky configuration in which you have a home office in your home. That's where you do email. That's where you do your Zoom meetings. But when it comes time to think deeply about something, then you go to the deep work shed where that's set up just for that type of work.

In general, what I'm trying to say here is this is a good time because there is so much autonomy being granted in the physical setup of your work locations. and people are in a mindset of experimentation, this is a good time to maybe think about some radical ideas for how to set up ideal environments for this task that us knowledge workers do of trying to extract value from human brains. The next question is from Don, who says, I teach science at a community college

and write non-fiction books. There are times in the year when it's fairly straightforward to manage everything, but as each semester ramps up, it becomes more and more challenging to keep writing, to keep my writing time blocks on the schedule. It's often tempting to surrender

just for a little while or, quote, just until I'm caught up, end quote, but I've learned over the years that doing that just makes me despise myself and catching up during the semester is probably just a delusion. We sell ourselves. Well, Don, as a fellow professor,

I can tell you that it's completely normal, to have a productivity seasonality, that during certain periods, like at the height of midterms in the fall, what your schedule looks like in terms of how much energy is being invested into different efforts will look quite different than early July, when maybe you have almost nothing else to do. So you should expect to have seasonality in terms of, for example, how much time is going into your nonfiction books,

or how much time is going into your research. We can flip this the other way, right? if you didn't have these types of changes, if you were working the same amount on let's say your non-fiction books year-round, then almost certainly that would mean that you're probably not putting enough time into those books during the slow periods

because there really is only so much amount of time available during the busy periods. It sounds like the issue here is avoiding the instinct to just give up. That is what is, I think, rightfully causing your mind to be a little bit suspicious. And I think what's happening, the reason why you're giving up is because you're not successfully accounting for the seasonality. What you need is different work rhythms for different times

of the year. So you know in advance, this is when things get busy. So I switch to this schedule for my writing. I switch to this schedule for my research. A schedule that keeps you with a steady drumbeat of progress, but it is perhaps significantly less daily effort, then let's say you're going to put in over break or put in over the summer or put in at the beginning or ending of your semesters. Figure out in advance a strategic retreat that gives you enough space to get through the busy periods but doesn't give up any more ground than it needs to. And so that might mean with your writing, I do it every morning first thing, but that's it because I know it gets chaotic after that.

Or this is what my Saturday and Sunday mornings are spent writing in a way. that I keep those weekends clear for other activities during the summer. Or I make Friday my research day. And I have to consolidate more work onto the Fridays, but I just don't schedule anything on those days. And that's why I do my research. Just have a plan for how you get the deep stuff done during the busy periods. Be fine with that plan, including less deep stuff than you do during the less busy periods.

But if you have that specific strategic retreat to execute and it's pre-planned, your mind will be more on board. So to summarize, it's okay for your deep work to go up and down. Just make sure it is going up and down intentionally on your own terms in a way that is making the most of what is possible. All right. And with that in mind, let's move on now to some technology questions. Let's start with a question from Joey, who asks, I've heard you say you keep nothing on your phone that was created by another mind or that will distract you. Does that apply to podcast?

Do you listen to podcasts? And if so, when? How do they apply to deep work? Well, Joey, I'm, of course, a little bit biased because you are listening to me right now on a podcast. But I do tend to think about podcast differently than other types of things that are on your phone. it should be helpful if I first clarify a little bit the suggestion that you were paraphrasing. My suggestion is not that you keep nothing on your phone that was created by another mind, as I hope at least that everything on your phone has been created by another mind.

I don't know how else things would get created. The advice I think you're thinking about is when I tell people to remove from their phone anything that makes money off your time and attention every time you tap on the application. The other piece of advice I think you're paraphrasing there is when I talk about solitude. And I say solitude is freedom from input from other minds. So to be in a state of solitude, you cannot be processing input that was created by another mind. That includes listening to a podcast. If you're listening to a podcast, you're not in solitude.

So let's take each of those suggestions separately and see what they tell us about podcasting. Then I'll talk a little bit more about my own podcast listening habits. The advice about removing from your phone anything that makes money off your time and attention, I typically give that advice when I am helping people kickstart a transformation of their relationship with technology. So if you're going to go through a digital declutter, for example, the type of thing I recommend in digital minimalism, That's a key first step is you're basically dumbing down your phone temporarily so that it cannot be a source of knee-jerk distraction. At the end of something like a digital declutter, however, some of these tools might come back onto your phone. Though in general, I suggest that you probably don't need most of the things that distract people on their phone don't need to be on there.

Most people who go through an intentional reconstruction of their technological lives using something like a digital declutter, we'll come out of that on the other end and decide there is no reason to have like let's say social media on my phone the reasons I use social media do not require me to have constant access to it so do podcasts apply here well they are I guess in theory

something in which people do make money when you click on it in the sense that a download of an episode a download of an episode is part of how let's say ad revenue is generated, but it really does feel like it's of a different character. It's a slower distraction, I guess I would say, because a podcast is not something that you can just quickly glance at when you are sort of bored while someone left the table and came back.

A podcast is something you don't glance at when you're at a traffic light. A podcast is something that you don't just sort of throw on surreptitiously in the pew at church, right? It's a slower media consumption experience. It's something where if I'm going to load up a podcast, I expect I have 15, 20 plus minutes to be listening to this. So it doesn't loom as a knee-jerk distraction. It's too slow of a consumption experience for that in a way that does not apply to,

let's say, social media where you can just hit that Twitter feed wherever you are, whenever you are, and it's right there to distract you. You might look at Twitter, Instagram, for example, while you're with other people watching a TV show, you're not going to put on a podcast while you're watching a TV show or while you're sitting there with other people. So it's a slower form of media, so it does not have that same possibility of being this knee-jerk distraction that fragments up your day and keeps you out of the world. So I'm less worried about it as a source of readily available distraction. When it comes to solitude, that applies. You do need

solitude. I talk about this, you do need solitude deprivation is a source of anxiety. You do need time alone with your own thoughts and observing the world around you on a regular basis. Podcasting breaks that. All right. So that is true. But as I talk about in digital minimalism, you don't need to be in solitude all the time. If you have excessive solitude, you are going to be miserable. You have to think about it like a vitamin. You need a little bit every day and maybe a bigger dose every once in a while. So yes, every day there should be at least one or two occasions in which you're not listening to a podcast, you're not reading social media, you're not looking at an iPad. It's just you, your thoughts, the world around you. If you're doing that once or twice a day,

you're fine. And in other times of the day, you can be listening to the podcast, then no problem. Maybe once a week or so, you should do a longer walk or have a longer experience without input from other minds. They put yourself in a state of solitude. Again, you don't need to be doing it all the time, as long as you're doing it on a semi-regular basis, you're okay. So just think about that like a vitamin. You need to get your vitamin solitude on a regular basis. And that vitamin needs to be taken without podcasting. So how do I use podcasts?

Well, what I always say on this show is I think it's a great accompaniment to non-cognitive activities. So if you have to be cleaning the house, if you have to be mowing the lawn, if you have to be running an errand in your car anyways. You might as well have something interesting to listen to. That's how I listen to the podcast. I think that's fine. As long as I give myself a little bit of solitude every day and larger doses of solitude

on a regular basis, I think that is completely healthy and completely fine. So if you're worried about using your phone too much, I don't think podcasts are your problem. If you're worried about solitude, yes, podcasts don't count. So make sure that you have some time without them. But beyond that, I think you can listen without too much guilt, especially if you're listening to this show. All right, Ellen says, I'm in customer service.

My email is flooded with customer and colleague's service request. Few tasks can be delegated, and just about all of these tasks require my attention. What can I do? Well, Ellen, I think you need a ticketing system. Ticketing systems were innovated in the world of information technology, but they can apply to many different areas and customer service is one of the key places where these systems apply. With a ticketing system, and there's a lot of them that are available, some of them cost money, some of them are free, some of them are freemium. Your company might already have some

available, but the basic idea behind these systems is that when a request comes in via email, it gets transformed into a ticket. Now the system I used to use when I was a director of graduate studies in my department at Georgetown, the way it worked is that emails incoming would automatically get transformed into tickets. So you can either have people write the ticketing system address directly, or like I did as a director of graduate study, I would just forward their messages to that address on their behalf and have it changed into a ticket. So they could email me if they were used to that, and I would just forward it to the ticketing system, get it transformed into a ticket. Now everything

that you need to do, everyone who is waiting for a response, you can see it in one place in a ticketing system, which is much better than looking at an inbox full of red and unread messages. You can assign statuses to each of these tickets. I haven't got to this one yet. I did get to this one, but I'm waiting to hear back from someone or something before we can move to the next step, or this one is resolved, or this one is partially resolved. So you can have statuses and quickly break up your tickets by the status. you can add notes and comments. You can capture all of the back and forth conversation right there with the ticket.

So all of the relevant information is right there. If you want to get more advanced, and this is something IT departments do all the time, you can have it set up so that you get automatic reminders are sent to the person who originally sent you the message. So they say, we're working on it. Here's where it stands. We're waiting to hear back from you. There are interfaces with a lot of these systems where the people with which you are

serving can ride in to get an update on the status so they get clarity about how things are going. All of this makes a big difference, and it makes support work significantly less stressful and significantly more efficient. It sounds like you have enough emails that you need a system like this. More generally, you should be thinking about system-type thinking. You know, where can I put in systems? Where can I put in? that is going to get rid of as much of the ad hoc nature of your work. That's going to reduce as much as possible this notion of things are coming at all times unpredictably that I have to sort of just unpredictably try to handle

and get it towards something more structured. I'm not an expert on customer support, but I know, for example, there's a company that I profiled in my new book that's coming out in March, and I forgot exactly what they called the system, but they had some sort of chat system that they used with their customers. customers where they could communicate with them with this chat system when they had a question or issue, and they realized that 90% of the issues could be basically prescripted. There could be prescripted responses that significantly cut down on the amount of time they had to spend

with ad hoc unpredictable communication with support. And so, again, just to be more broad, even beyond ticketing systems, where are their processes, where are their systems that can structure what you are doing? What you want to get away from is ad hoc unstructured communication. What you want to get away from is just stuff comes in. I try to handle it. If I'm not able to handle it right away, it goes into a big pile. The pile is a source of stress.

And I kind of just randomly try to grab stuff out of there or when people yell at me, go remember what they said. That's incredibly stressful. Nothing's going to get done. Well, things will get done. But things aren't going to get done effectively. You're going to be stressed out. People are going to be unhappy.

non-urgent, important work outside of this customer response is never going to happen. And you're never going to be happy, right? So you need systems, you need structure so that it's not so ad hoc. It's not so unpredictable. You know where everything stands. People can find out where they stand. You cut down on the back and forth. You could be more targeted about the back and forth you do, and you can get some breathing

room to work on some other things or shut down with clarity, whatever it is that you're probably missing right now due to the more chaotic nature of your work. So Ellen, I think it's time that you basically treat yourself like I'm a support department and I need to support my efforts with the proper processes systems and technologies. I want to take a moment to thank another sponsor that makes this podcast possible, and that is Four Sigma. I've been talking about Four Sigma on this podcast for many months now. They produce their famous ground.

mushroom coffee. This is coffee that includes Lionsmain and Shaga mushroom. As I've mentioned, this coffee is a big part of my deep work initiation rituals. It's mild. The mushroom gives it a nutty flavor, which is very distinctive. And once you drink it, there is some sort of impact that the Shaga and the Lionsmaid has on your physiology. I don't know exactly how it works, but it's distinctive, which makes the 4-Sigmatic a great hook for telling your mind it's time to do deep work. It's a very distinctive experience that my mind now associates with time to switch from the shallows and time to turn our focus onto deeper endeavors.

Not only does 4-Sigmatic always have a 100% money-back guarantee, but right now you can try their amazing products for up to 50,000. 50% off. Now, on top of that 15% off, I've worked out an exclusive additional 10% off all sale products. But this is just for deep questions listeners. So to claim this deal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. Again, this offers only for deep questions listeners and is not available on their regular website. This sale ends soon, so go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep to begin your own mushroom coffee experience.

I also want to talk about Headspace. A common theme in this podcast is that you need to treat your brain with respect. If you don't, it is not going to serve you well. So if like a lot of people, you are bathing your brain in distraction, doom scrolling on Twitter, numbing with Netflix, email checks and slack checks every three minutes, that brain is going to get muddled. That brain is going to get anxious and is going to weaken the quality of your life. Well, there's a lot of ways to treat your brain well to get your brain back into shape. And for millions and millions of people, mindfulness meditation is one of these effective training. techniques. The Headspace app is the leading app for helping you quickly develop an effective

mindfulness meditation routine. It can provide you a daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations. It is the only meditation app that advanced to feel the mindfulness meditation through conducting its own clinically validated research. Another thing they do, which I think is cool, is that they have guided meditations tied to specific issues. Are you feeling suddenly very anxious about the world? They have, for example, a three-minute SOS meditation just to help you. Is the news overwhelming you? They have a particular guided meditation to help you release from those particular ruminations.

Headspace is backed by 25 published studies on his benefit, 600,000 five-star reviews, and over 60 million downloads. so you know there must be something working here. So you deserve to feel happier and Headspace is meditation made simple, so go to headspace.com slash questions. That's headspace.com slash questions for a free one-month trial

with access to Headspace's full library of meditations for every situation. This is the best deal you're going to find anywhere right now, and you can only get it at headspace.com slash questions. Moving on, our next technology question comes from Gonzalo, who says, I have been using time blocking at work, as described in deep work, but using org mode instead, pretty successfully. But at home, things are quite chaotic in comparison. I have a working wife and a four-year-old kid, and we struggle to get organized with the different priorities around the house. I've been thinking of doing weekly assessments of such priorities and blocking time each day,

for the main ones. Well, first of all, I guess technically speaking, this is not really a technology question, but I put it here because Gonzalo mentioned org mode, which means he is one of the high nerd tribe in which I also belong, and so I wanted to give him that nod.

Org mode for non-nerds is a mode for the EMAX text editor. If you don't know what that is, that means you're probably not a computer programmer. It's a text editing environment that is Unix-based, and you can customize it with these different modes. An org mode makes this sort of plain character-based text editor configured for lists and notes, etc. It's something that a lot of the original life hackers, and by the original life hackers, I mean the people that Danny O'Brien talked about in his famous 2003 talk in which he coined a term life hackers, These original life hackers he talked about were largely computer developers, largely using tools like Emacs or VI, and maintaining control over all their obligations in life using these text files edited in these highly customizable text editors. So Gonzalo, I appreciate org mode and you have earned yourself a designation as a technology question.

Moving on now to the actual meat of what you're asking about. I think what you are describing as a solution is more or less right. It's basically the way I talk about organizing weekend time or vacation time, where you do not want to time block every minute of your day. I think trying to time block every minute of a day in which you were with a four-year-old would be difficult. But you are trying to crudely block out a couple things each day to make sure that progress is made and you know exactly when that progress or more or less when that progress is going to get made. So if it's during nap time, I'm going to work on this, and I got to get whatever, these Christmas cards sent out, and I'm going to do it at this point.

Having two things that you've roughly assigned to times, you build your daily schedule, your household schedule around that, I think that's very smart. I also think your weekly assessment idea is very smart. Of course, I would use the terminology of a weekly plan, but when you're running a household, I think weekly planning becomes critical. it really allows you to figure out what needs to get done this week. You know, if you have kids, you have a house, it's complicated. The sequencing of events and how far in advance things need to happen can be somewhat complicated, and I think you definitely need to move above the scope of the day. So you can figure out, oh, I got to go to the store on Tuesday because Wednesday I'm doing this,

and Thursday is going to be my only chance to get to the shoe store. You got to move those chess pieces around the time management chessboard. So I think doing a really serious weekly plan to figure out your week and having a couple approximately placed blocks each day that you build the schedule around to make sure that your household priorities are advanced. I think that is absolutely the right balance between the extremes of no planning and the type of ultra-precise time block planning that maybe like an executive would do with every minute of their working day. So Gonzalo is I would expect from someone who is using something like org mode, you have hit this one just right. What you have in mind should work. And I think you're going to find success with it. All right.

I think we have time for one more technology question. Arjohn asks, what is the best way to remember and apply what you have already read? Well, Arjohn, I'm a big believer in the corner marking method. when I'm reading a physical book, I put check marks or bracket out important sections. A couple other symbols I'll sometimes use like an exclamation point or a star. Exclamation point is usually for something that is surprising or noteworthy. A star is usually for something that really emphasizes or underscores a point that I find to be important. If I have done any marks like that on a page, I put a slash in the corner of the page using a pencil,

or a pin. Once I'm done with a book, it is now very easy to later come back to that book and pull out the main ideas because you can just rifle through the pages looking at the corners. Everywhere you see a slash, you can stop and look at that page and jump in right to what is checked or right to what is bracketed and just read those sections. If you mark up a book this way, you can typically review all the main ideas in about 10 minutes by just going through looking at the marks. And so that's usually how I collect information. If I'm reading on a Kindle, I'll use highlights, and then I will download, Kindle will generate a PDF with all of that highlighted text extracted, so I can do that if I'm reading a book on a Kindle.

That's most of what I do, because what I find Arsend is that I'll remember, roughly speaking, what a book was about. And so if it becomes potentially relevant later for another project, I'll remember, oh yeah, that book might be relevant here, because I'll have a rough memory of what it had in it, and then I'll just go through my marks and quickly refresh myself and okay here's all the important points and that tends to work well. The one exception is if I'm reading a lot of books to use for a book chapter or maybe a long form article, I might write up in the relevant Evernote notebook a summary of the book, a page or so. So that I'll say, oh yeah, at this point, this point, this point, largely speaking, it's good for supporting this or not supporting that. So if I know that I'm going to use

these books soon for like pulling the other a complex argument. I might write up a summary. But really for the most part, I find I don't forget the general idea of what's in books. I'm pretty good at remembering, looking at my shelf and remembering this one, this one, and this one might be relevant for what I'm working on now. And the corner

marking method gets you the information you need quick. So for me, that's always been the right balance between efficiency. Again, if you have an over the top or very involved note-taking method, you're just not going to do it after a while. So it's a good balance between getting you enough efficiency, but still being effective in condensing information and allowing you to find

the information you need quickly. All right. And with that, let's move on to our final segments, which is questions about the deep life. Abe asks, how often do you update your core values or rooted productivity file? We should do a quick review here. So when Abe is referring to core values. He's talking about the document that I suggest everyone maintain that lists, these are my core values in life. A little bit of a deeper cut is his reference to the rooted productivity file. I've discussed this occasionally on the podcast and I've written about this more in past years on my blog. But I do like the idea of having a root for all of your life control productivity philosophical systems, whatever you want to call it, the things that

dictate how you structure and approach your life, I feel like that should all be in one place so that you don't have to remember it all. All you have to remember is, you know, I go to this directory and maybe there's a master, I used to call it a productivity root file, but there's like a master list there that maybe says, here's what I do. I have my core values. I do daily planning. I do weekly planning. I do quarterly planning. Like, where you just, you capture somewhere

in one place, this is how I run all of my systems. And then technically all you really have to remember is that that place has all your systems. Now, of course, in practice, after a while, you get used to these systems and you remember them. But still, there's something clean about having that all written down in one place. The way I interpret Abe's question, though, is how often do you change the sort of basic structure of your systems? And how often do you change the core values that you have listed? And my answer, Abe, is not that often. my core values, I don't know, once a year at most, they probably get changed.

Now it's not that I have a set times. Oh, this is when I revisit my core values and update them. I update them when I think they need to be updated. But they're pretty fundamental. And so changes to those require pretty fundamental changes in my outlook on life, and those tend to come slowly. Same thing with my core productivity systems. Now, one of the ways I have avoided needing to change my sort of root productivity systems, the stuff that I just commit to doing. One of the ways I have avoided a lot of churn on that is that I separate out experiments in productivity. So my quarterly plans often include short-term experiments, things I'm trying this month or things I'm trying this season. I'm trying them on for size so that when I check my

quarterly plan every week to build my weekly plan, I see and remind myself, oh, I'm trying this now. or I'm going to try to schedule work this way. And many things don't make it past that testing phase, but if something makes it through that testing phase and it becomes a permanent, I'll eventually make it a permanent addition, but this allows me to try out different productivity systems or adjustments to my systems

or do temporary adjustments to account for particular seasons or times, that can turn quickly without having to affect my core list of here's the things that for sure I always do. Probably the last major change to my, root document of my core productivity systems is when I added a couple years ago a much more rigorous metric tracking habit. And that made a big difference. But beyond that, it really has been the same. I mean, I have my daily, weekly, quarterly planning where the daily happens with time blocking and I use full capture with a shutdown routine. That has been in place for a very long time.

on the value side, you know, reviewing weekly my values and having a value plan, some notes on what I want to work on that week with respect to living my life closer to my values, and using that as the foundation for a quarterly plan for my life outside of work that I check every week as well. That's all basically stayed very stable. This notion that I track metrics was something that was added to that system that has been very important and effective for me. but that's otherwise been quite stable. Karsten asks,

what you do when productivity has become so all-encompassing that it has the opposite of its intended effect. You spend more time optimizing than actually getting stuff done. Well, Carson, I think about productivity sometimes like weightlifting routines. They help you get more out of your time in the gym. but really are meaningless on their own. The thing that really matters is those hours you actually spend doing the hard work of lifting to heavy things. So you're better off with a weight lifting routine than not if you're going into the gym.

But if you're not going into the gym at all, it doesn't matter how much time you spend studying optimal reps or set counts because nothing's actually going to get done. Well, it's the same thing with productivity. The underlying activity is what's important. You have to go out there and get after it, actually produce things and think about things and do things. And the productivity systems are like weightlifting routines. There's some structure and some guides to make sure that when you're out there actually doing things, that you are getting a good return on your investment. So I can think of two areas where you might want to focus to help reduce how encompassing

productivity systems themselves have become in your life. and that is how often you're messing around with your systems and how complicated your systems actually are. Let's start first with how often, and I would say this is something that belongs in the quarterly planning stage. I mean, I just talked about in my answer to the last question, the question Abe asked, I talked about how I rarely change my fundamental productivity systems. The core of how I approach my day has been more or less in place for years. I only alter it every once in a while. I'll tweak things around the edges.

I'll experiment with some new tools or technologies, but for the most part, it's pretty simple the core things I use to run my life. And I don't change it that often. So think about this as something to be done when you do your quarterly planning. Once every quarter or once every semester, if you're more academic-minded,

you can check in, what is my productivity system? But then you want it to become almost boring in the months that follows. It's just the same thing. saying again and again and again, you don't even really think about it anymore. It's not a big part of your cognitive landscape. It's just something you do. Just like, I don't think much more anymore about like, I just do my weekly plan. I do my daily plans. I do my shutdown routines

the end of the day. It's, it's wrote for me. I've been doing it for years. It's not a source of excitement. It's not a source of stress. It's not a source of possibility. It's just what I do. So work on your system less. Once a quarter at most, make it something boring. you might want to simplify. You might want to consider as we enter this new quarter, the winter corner, which also corresponds with New Year's thinking, strip back your productivity systems. Start with something a little bit more basic and then see how that goes and slowly start adding back to it.

So it's possible based on the way you ask your question that you have added too much to your system and it's too much to keep track of. So try stripping it back. put in some basic ideas and systems. Trust yourself not to go completely off the rails. I think you might be pleasantly surprised that even a more minimalist productivity system helps keep that energy focused,

helps keep those weights being lifted in the proper metaphorical sequence. I don't know enough weightlifting technology to make that metaphor work properly, but you get what I'm saying. So maybe you strip it back. A weekly plan. I daily plan.

I quarterly plan. I have captured and a shutdown complete routine. I keep all of my tasks in this system, time block in this system. You know, maybe that's it. I do metric tracking, no more than five metrics. Maybe add that in there as well. And you can kind of experiment with your metrics. That's a place you can fiddle a little bit, but your fiddling is constrained.

You know, rain it back. Rain it back. Give yourself some faith that like with some structure, because you're used to this type of thinking already that you will do fine. Let that system become boring day after day after day after day after day. And then when you get to the spring, you can step back and say, oh, maybe I want to add something back. Maybe I want to change something and you can spend the day or two and geek out on productivity stuff. And then again, let the new system become boring day after day after day after day.

All right. I hope that helps. Just remember, you know, it helps to have a weightlifting routine. But if you're not actually in there lifting weights, then nothing is going to happen. All right. I think we have time for one more question. And it comes from Helen, who says, Hi, Cal, I'm a big fan of your podcast and your ideas have totally changed my views towards productivity, specifically on the deep life. I appreciate your advice about tackling the buckets one by one and starting with Keystone habits, but being in a fast-paced environment where everyone is insanely

smart. How do I suppress my deep insecurities and not worry about the gap between where I want to be and where I am now? Well, Helen, one thing that I think is important to keep in mind is that a commitment to the deep life is often a different commitment than to the life of maximum possible professional success. The deep life is one that is trying to maximize. maximize things like meaning and satisfaction and impact, but also resilience to the unexpected, hard things that are inevitably going to come along. And that type of life often requires some different commitments than instead saying what I want to do is be the maximum size beast in my field. Now, there's a lot of fields out there in particular in which really trying to own that field,

to be a superstar in that field is probably expressly uncompatible with living a deep life. I mean, I'm thinking about if you're trying to build out, for example, a really intense partnership practice at a law firm, you really want to do that. If you really want to be a beast at that, if you really want to make into a huge practice and be really, really well known,

it's very difficult to have a more well-rounded deep life at the same time because it is going to take all of your hours away from the community bucket, from the Constitution bucket, from the contemplation bucket. So that's one thing to keep in mind. A deep life is not the same thing as a maximally successful professional life. I think that is a fair trade, but it's something that we have to acknowledge and make peace with.

Now, with this in mind, I do want to point out that the deep life is often quite compatible with a very successful professional life. I mean, because you are trying to, among other things, optimize your craft bucket, you're more likely to focus in on the things that matter and get rid of distractions in the professional landscape that take away your attention. So compared to your peers, you're probably going to have a higher deep to shallow ratio. You're also going to focus probably if you're undergoing a deep life cultivation process, you're going to focus craftsmanship is very important, deliberately practicing your skills getting better. so I think someone who embraces the deep life is going to be very good at what they do and can do really high-impact work and be quite rewarded for it and have a lot of autonomy and get a lot of pride out of it.

But if you are in a very competitive field, it's probably not going to be the recipe for being the very best in your field or the recipe for, you know, really being a beast in terms of the numbers you put up on the proverbial professional scoreboard here. And I think that's okay. I think that's okay. So what you have to commit to is what you get out of a deep life more generally, which is in addition to a professional life that is a source of meaning and it's impactful and important and a source of pride. It's these other things that are important in your life. You're focusing on the things that matter.

You're moving away towards the things that don't. This is a multifaceted and diverse sources of meaning. This in exchange gives you a lot of resilience. so when you go through hard times, you get sick. Someone you know gets sick. The industry you're in goes away. The global pandemic comes through. And when you go through these hard times,

you are able to actually lean into them and find even more meaning in your life as opposed to being knocked back, being knocked back into a fetal position. There are a few approaches to life less resilient than having everything put in on just your career, sacrificing everything else, because what happens when that doesn't go the right direction?

What do you have? Where are your reserves? There's nothing else there. So that's what I would pitch, Helen. That being said, let me completely validate your feelings. I get these all the time. I am surrounded by insanely smart people in all the different endeavors I do.

And because of the level at which I do these endeavors, here's how it works. The higher level you do an endeavor at, you know who you get exposed to regularly, the people at the next highest level. And those levels go up and up and up and up, right? So I get it. I get it.

It's difficult. It's difficult when you see, I'm doing fine, but I could be doing better. This is going really well, but if I did nothing but focus on this, I could have gotten out more of this and maybe been where this person is. It's okay to feel some insecurities about that. It's okay to be a little bit worried about that, but I think the response is to turn back towards your commitment to a deep life more generally and say, yes, but this is what is going to sustain me for an entire life. This is what's going to make my moment-to-moment existence, something that is more enjoyable, more meaningful, more satisfying.

And I think that is worth the occasional insecurities. That's worth the occasional jealousies. It might help to also surround yourself or interact with other people who are committed to living deeper, as opposed to just being around people who are committed to pushing their current career to the highest point of view. It might be helped to sort of step back and have some pride in what you have accomplished because, again, I'm telling you the people who commit to these ideas, they do great in their career. So again, I'm not telling you to take your foot off the gas pedal on your career. But to take pride in what you are doing, that your craft is something that you're honing, that you produce stuff that you're proud of, that's impactful, that you keep upping your game.

maybe you're doing less of it than other people, maybe you're a little bit more focused about it, maybe you have some more seasonality in how you do it, but you're still growing and producing valuable things. In the long run, that's important, take pride in it. All those things can help, but ultimately, I choose the deep life because I think it's the right way to live. I think it's the best way to live,

the most resilient and meaningful way to live. And if you make that similar commitment, I think it is worth, it is worth the feelings of insecurity, that will occasionally come around because what would be required to try to get rid of those feelings of insecurities would almost certainly be an unfair trade

when it comes to the overall quality of your life. All right, that is all the time we have for this week's episode. If you want an opportunity to ask your own questions for the podcast, you need to sign up for my mailing list at calduport.com. I'll be back later this week. with a habit-tweet-up mini-episode, which will be, believe it or not, the final episode of 2020. So until then, as always, stay deep.